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odiesbsc 125

You, like practically every other person seeking to diminish our constitutional rights, either does not understand the purpose of the Second Amendment or refuses to address it, writing, “Gun advocates will be hard-pressed to explain why the average American citizen needs an assault weapon with a high-capacity magazine other than for recreational purposes.” The answer to this question is straightforward: The purpose of having citizens armed with paramilitary weapons is to allow them to engage in paramilitary actions. The Second Amendment is not about Bambi and burglars — whatever a well-regulated militia is, it is not a hunting party or a sport-clays club. It is remarkable to me that any educated person — let alone a Harvard Law graduate — believes that the second item on the Bill of Rights is a constitutional guarantee of enjoying a recreational activity.

There is no legitimate exception to the Second Amendment for military-style weapons, because military-style weapons are precisely what the Second Amendment guarantees our right to keep and bear. The purpose of the Second Amendment is to secure our ability to oppose enemies foreign and domestic, a guarantee against disorder and tyranny. Consider the words of Supreme Court justice Joseph Story — who was, it bears noting, appointed to the Court by the guy who wrote the Constitution:

The importance of this article will scarcely be doubted by any persons, who have duly reflected upon the subject. The militia is the natural defense of a free country against sudden foreign invasions, domestic insurrections, and domestic usurpations of power by rulers. It is against sound policy for a free people to keep up large military establishments and standing armies in time of peace, both from the enormous expenses, with which they are attended, and the facile means, which they afford to ambitious and unprincipled rulers, to subvert the government, or trample upon the rights of the people. The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.

“Usurpation and arbitrary power of the rulers” — not Bambi, not burglars. While your granddad’s .30-06 is a good deal more powerful than the .223 rifles that give blue-state types the howling fantods, that is not what we have a constitutional provision to protect. Liberals are forever asking: “Why would anybody need a gun like that?” And the answer is: because we are not serfs. We are a free people living under a republic of our own construction. We may consent to be governed, but we will not be ruled.

The right to keep and bear arms is a civil right. If you doubt that, consider the history of arms control in England, where members of the Catholic minority (and non-Protestants generally) were prohibited from bearing arms as part of the campaign of general political oppression against them. The Act of Disenfranchisement was still in effect when our Constitution was being written, a fact that surely was on the mind of such Founding Fathers as Daniel Carroll, to say nothing of his brother, Archbishop John Carroll.

The Second Amendment speaks to the nature of the relationship between citizen and state. Brett may think that such a notion is an antiquated relic of the 18th century, but then he should be arguing for wholesale repeal of the Second Amendment rather than presenting — what’s the word? — disingenuous arguments about what it means and the purpose behind it.

If we want to reduce the level of criminal violence in our society, we should start by demanding that the police and criminal-justice bureaucracies do their job. Massacres such as Sandy Hook catch our attention because they are so unusual. But a great deal of the commonplace violence in our society is preventable. Brett here might look to his hometown: There were 1,662 murders in New York City from 2003 to 2005, and a New York Times analysis of the data found that in 90 percent of the cases, the killer had a prior criminal record. (About half the victims did, too.) Events such as Sandy Hook may come out of nowhere, but the great majority of murders do not. The police function in essence as a janitorial service, cleaning up the mess created in part by our dysfunctional criminal-justice system.

We probably would get more out of our criminal-justice system if it were not so heavily populated by criminals. As I note in my upcoming book, The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome, it can be hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys:

For more than twenty years, NYPD detectives worked as enforcers and assassins for the Gambino crime family; in 2006 two detectives were convicted not only of murder and conspiracy to commit murder but also on charges related to such traditional mob activity as labor racketeering, running illegal gambling rings, extortion, narcotics trafficking, obstruction of justice, and the like. This was hardly an isolated incident; only a few years prior to the NYPD convictions more than 70 LAPD officers associated with the city’s anti-gang unit were found to have been deeply involved in gang-affiliated criminal enterprises connected to the Bloods street gang. Their crimes ranged from the familiar police transgressions of falsifying evidence, obstructing justice, and selling drugs seized in arrests to such traditional outlaw fare as bank robbery — they were cops and robbers. More than 100 criminal convictions were overturned because of evidence planted or falsified by officers of the LAPD. One scholarly account of the scandal concluded that such activity is not atypical but rather systemic — and largely immune to attempts at reform: “The current institution of law enforcement in America does appear to reproduce itself according [to] counter-legal norms . . . attempts to counteract this reproduction via the training one receives in police academies, the imposition of citizen review boards, departments of Internal Affairs, etc. do not appear to mitigate against this structural continuity between law enforcement and crime.”

The Department of Homeland Security has existed for only a few years but it already has been partly transformed into an organized-crime syndicate. According to a federal report, in 2011 alone more than 300 DHS employees and contractors were charged with crimes ranging from smuggling drugs and child pornography to selling sensitive intelligence to drug cartels. That’s not a few bad apples — that’s an arrest every weekday and many weekends. Given the usual low ratio of arrests to crimes committed, it is probable that DHS employees are responsible for not hundreds but thousands of crimes. And these are not minor infractions: Agents in the department’s immigration division were caught selling forged immigrant documents, and DHS vehicles have been used to transport hundreds (and possibly thousands) of pounds of illegal drugs. A “stand over” crew — that is, a criminal enterprise that specializes in robbing other criminals — was found being run by a DHS agent in Arizona, who was apprehended while hijacking a truckload of cocaine.

Power corrupts. Madison knew that, and the other Founders did, too, which is why we have a Second Amendment.

in the 18th century that would be true. Not so much today.

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odiesbsc 125

Astral Projection

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Some folks drink from the fountain of knowledge. Some folks just gargle and spit it out.

You, like practically every other person seeking to diminish our constitutional rights, either does not understand the purpose of the Second Amendment or refuses to address it, writing, “Gun advocates will be hard-pressed to explain why the average American citizen needs an assault weapon with a high-capacity magazine other than for recreational purposes.” The answer to this question is straightforward: The purpose of having citizens armed with paramilitary weapons is to allow them to engage in paramilitary actions. The Second Amendment is not about Bambi and burglars — whatever a well-regulated militia is, it is not a hunting party or a sport-clays club. It is remarkable to me that any educated person — let alone a Harvard Law graduate — believes that the second item on the Bill of Rights is a constitutional guarantee of enjoying a recreational activity.

There is no legitimate exception to the Second Amendment for military-style weapons, because military-style weapons are precisely what the Second Amendment guarantees our right to keep and bear. The purpose of the Second Amendment is to secure our ability to oppose enemies foreign and domestic, a guarantee against disorder and tyranny. Consider the words of Supreme Court justice Joseph Story — who was, it bears noting, appointed to the Court by the guy who wrote the Constitution:

The importance of this will scarcely be doubted by any persons, who have duly reflected upon the subject. The militia is the natural defense of a free country against sudden foreign invasions, domestic insurrections, and domestic usurpations of power by rulers. It is against sound policy for a free people to keep up large military establishments and standing armies in time of peace, both from the enormous expenses, with which they are attended, and the facile means, which they afford to ambitious and unprincipled rulers, to subvert the government, or trample upon the rights of the people. The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.

“Usurpation and arbitrary power of the rulers” — not Bambi, not burglars. While your granddad’s .30-06 is a good deal more powerful than the .223 rifles that give blue-state types the howling fantods, that is not what we have a constitutional provision to protect. Liberals are forever asking: “Why would anybody need a gun like that?” And the answer is: because we are not serfs. We are a free people living under a republic of our own construction. We may consent to be governed, but we will not be ruled.

The right to keep and bear arms is a civil right. If you doubt that, consider the history of arms control in England, where members of the Catholic minority (and non-Protestants generally) were prohibited from bearing arms as part of the campaign of general political oppression against them. The Act of Disenfranchisement was still in effect when our Constitution was being written, a fact that surely was on the mind of such Founding Fathers as Daniel Carroll, to say nothing of his brother, Archbishop John Carroll.

The Second Amendment speaks to the nature of the relationship between citizen and state. Brett may think that such a notion is an antiquated relic of the 18th century, but then he should be arguing for wholesale repeal of the Second Amendment rather than presenting — what’s the word? — disingenuous arguments about what it means and the purpose behind it.

If we want to reduce the level of criminal violence in our society, we should start by demanding that the police and criminal-justice bureaucracies do their job. Massacres such as Sandy Hook catch our attention because they are so unusual. But a great deal of the commonplace violence in our society is preventable. Brett here might look to his hometown: There were 1,662 murders in New York City from 2003 to 2005, and a New York Times analysis of the data found that in 90 percent of the cases, the killer had a prior criminal record. (About half the victims did, too.) Events such as Sandy Hook may come out of nowhere, but the great majority of murders do not. The police function in essence as a janitorial service, cleaning up the mess created in part by our dysfunctional criminal-justice system.

We probably would get more out of our criminal-justice system if it were not so heavily populated by criminals. The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome, it can be hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys:

For more than twenty years, NYPD detectives worked as enforcers and assassins for the Gambino crime family; in 2006 two detectives were convicted not only of murder and conspiracy to commit murder but also on charges related to such traditional mob activity as labor racketeering, running illegal gambling rings, extortion, narcotics trafficking, obstruction of justice, and the like. This was hardly an isolated incident; only a few years prior to the NYPD convictions more than 70 LAPD officers associated with the city’s anti-gang unit were found to have been deeply involved in gang-affiliated criminal enterprises connected to the Bloods street gang. Their crimes ranged from the familiar police transgressions of falsifying evidence, obstructing justice, and selling drugs seized in arrests to such traditional outlaw fare as bank robbery — they were cops and robbers. More than 100 criminal convictions were overturned because of evidence planted or falsified by officers of the LAPD. One scholarly account of the scandal concluded that such activity is not atypical but rather systemic — and largely immune to attempts at reform: “The current institution of law enforcement in America does appear to reproduce itself according [to] counter-legal norms . . . attempts to counteract this reproduction via the training one receives in police academies, the imposition of citizen review boards, departments of Internal Affairs, etc. do not appear to mitigate against this structural continuity between law enforcement and crime.”

The Department of Homeland Security has existed for only a few years but it already has been partly transformed into an organized-crime syndicate. According to a federal report, in 2011 alone more than 300 DHS employees and contractors were charged with crimes ranging from smuggling drugs and child pornography to selling sensitive intelligence to drug cartels. That’s not a few bad apples — that’s an arrest every weekday and many weekends. Given the usual low ratio of arrests to crimes committed, it is probable that DHS employees are responsible for not hundreds but thousands of crimes. And these are not minor infractions: Agents in the department’s immigration division were caught selling forged immigrant documents, and DHS vehicles have been used to transport hundreds (and possibly thousands) of pounds of illegal drugs. A “stand over” crew — that is, a criminal enterprise that specializes in robbing other criminals — was found being run by a DHS agent in Arizona, who was apprehended while hijacking a truckload of cocaine.

Power corrupts. Madison knew that, and the other Founders did, too, which is why we have a Second Amendment.

[

Edited December 31, 2012 by odiesbsc

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odiesbsc 125

Astral Projection

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Some folks drink from the fountain of knowledge. Some folks just gargle and spit it out.

Do not be fooled by a belief that progressives, leftists hate guns. Oh, no, they do not. What they hate is guns in the hands of those who are not marching in lock step of their ideology. They hate guns in the hands of those who think for themselves and do not obey without question. They hate guns in those whom they have slated for a barrel to the back of the ear.

Do not be fooled by a belief that progressives, leftists hate guns. Oh, no, they do not. What they hate is guns in the hands of those who are not marching in lock step of their ideology. They hate guns in the hands of those who think for themselves and do not obey without question. They hate guns in those whom they have slated for a barrel to the back of the ear.

Stanislav Mishin

Lefties as you call them believe in Democracy and rule by consent of the people. Lefties and progressives do not believe that when that consent goes against their wishes they then have the automatic right to foment riot and rebellion. That is a fact which is lost on many of the extremist right wing people who seem to believe that a disagreement over political principles can be resolved through a minority shooting it out with their elected Government.

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MstrMsn 125

It wil never happen here ! But We do need to get rid of all the Automatic weapons !

There's this nice little piece of law we have here called the National Firearms Act. Ownership and possession of automatic weapons is covered by this - you basically need permission from the government, and it is a royal pain to get this permission.

Now, as former military, I can tell you that full auto is a waste, unless you need to utilize it suppressing the enemy in order to either fall back, get to a fallen comrade, or out flank them. Do civilians really need full auto? Nope. While it's fun to shoot, it's not practical.

All of the firearms related violence attributed to full auto weapons are by gang members, drug dealers and other criminal sorts. Good luck trying to get them to give up any of their guns, because they won't - and you'll be lucky to be left alive after demanding such a thing from those people.

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odiesbsc 125

Lefties as you call them believe in Democracy and rule by consent of the people. Lefties and progressives do not believe that when that consent goes against their wishes they then have the automatic right to foment riot and rebellion. That is a fact which is lost on many of the extremist right wing people who seem to believe that a disagreement over political principles can be resolved through a minority shooting it out with their elected Government.

Br Cornelius

It wasn't me who called anyone "leftists or lefties". That was a quote from a Russian newspaper.

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odiesbsc 125

Astral Projection

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Some folks drink from the fountain of knowledge. Some folks just gargle and spit it out.

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Liquid Gardens 3,812

You, like practically every other person seeking to diminish our constitutional rights,

Ah, but it all depends on which constitutional right you select, correct? You aren't trying to diminish our constitutional right to amend the Constitution, are you (which probably has almost zero chance of occurring anyway)?

The answer to this question is straightforward: The purpose of having citizens armed with paramilitary weapons is to allow them to engage in paramilitary actions.

And we've seen all the collateral damage that purpose has resulted in, all to allow the citizens to engage in paramilitary actions which hasn't actually been needed for what, over a century now at least? We already have the most powerful military in the world to protect us against 'foreign' threats, and it's laughable that, even if we threw the door wide open and allowed automatic weapons, allowing citizens to possess guns would result in any hesitation by a tyrannical government intent on subduing us. I've got two words for you: "Air Force" (which would result in two other words for the citizenry: 'game over'.)

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rippedagain5 0

Why does the UN even care about our gun rights? Maybe because our government did a study to see how many of our own military would fire on US citizens.The results were overwhelmingly no way. So if /when the US declares marshall law they are bringing in UN troops to "contain" us. They have been training them near here for years. They have maps of what they call hot spots which show basicly where they'll have fight on their hands. We have the second amendment to protect ourselves from just such things. As for assault riffles, thats exactly what they meant (well if they had them then). It keeps us from being overrun by our government.Otherwise we don't stand a chance.

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DONTEATUS 3,396

Left & Right how they both can be wrong ! Automatic weapons will indeed be the start of the End of our world ! like was posted before once the U.N starts to take over the streets and the Hot spots get even hotter,By that time all the Gun toteing Idiots will join in on the merriment ! What a World,What a World ! Im melting,Im melting !

just Shoot me !

By the way Im a Left winger peace love and Blue jeans kinda guy ! I HATE GUNS ! ANd the people that think they need them !ITs my Rights . RIGHT ?

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MstrMsn 125

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"If you don't like the answer, you shouldn't have asked the question!"

Why does the UN even care about our gun rights? Maybe because our government did a study to see how many of our own military would fire on US citizens.The results were overwhelmingly no way. So if /when the US declares marshall law they are bringing in UN troops to "contain" us. They have been training them near here for years. They have maps of what they call hot spots which show basicly where they'll have fight on their hands. We have the second amendment to protect ourselves from just such things. As for assault riffles, thats exactly what they meant (well if they had them then). It keeps us from being overrun by our government.Otherwise we don't stand a chance.

The UN doesn't care about our gun anything.

The US Constitution Article 1, Section 9 states, "The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."

So, I ask... how will Martial Law be declared? Neither the president nor congress can do so, unless the above exceptions are met. Doing so would be considered treasonous, and possibly a declaration of war against the citizens. And if UN troops were brought in, it would absolutely be considered an invasion by a foreign military, and under the Rules of Land Warfare, we would be well within our rights to repell them.

Edited January 4, 2013 by MstrMsn

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MstrMsn 125

Psychic Spy

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"If you don't like the answer, you shouldn't have asked the question!"

Left & Right how they both can be wrong ! Automatic weapons will indeed be the start of the End of our world ! like was posted before once the U.N starts to take over the streets and the Hot spots get even hotter,By that time all the Gun toteing Idiots will join in on the merriment ! What a World,What a World ! Im melting,Im melting !

just Shoot me !

By the way Im a Left winger peace love and Blue jeans kinda guy ! I HATE GUNS ! ANd the people that think they need them !ITs my Rights . RIGHT ?